If you answered B, congratulations! Time for your train station Bollywood dance sequence!

Reminder: Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture at the Oscars the same year The Dark Knight and WALL•E were eligible.

Links are still one of the most important ranking signals for Google. They always have been. The more relevant and authoritative backlinks you have that point to your site, the more likely you are to rank.

There is a common misconception that links don’t matter in today’s algorithms. And while that may be true of one of the not-so-major search engines, it certainly isn’t true of the big two where links still matter: Google and Bing.

Those with the old-school mindset of SEO still look at link building as a numbers game. If you ask enough people for a link, you’ll get a link or two in return. But link building today isn’t about asking enough people, it’s about engaging with the right people.

It’s hard to keep up on the latest thought leadership, ideas, trends and news in the web marketing industry, which is why we bring you the Final Lap. Each member of Pole Position Marketing Pit Crew, and the office alter ego, Max Speed, bring you their winning article to help your business.

Topics include SEO, paid search, usability, link building, local search, content marketing, social media and other areas of marketing and business. Plus, you’ll find articles that have earned “honorable mentions” and are also worth a read. Enjoy and feel free to comment with your winning articles.… Continue Reading

Reach people through channels that are less saturated. Twitter, email, and Facebook are typically saturated, and the chances of getting a response there is very low.

However, if you follow them in other ways, you can get a response. An example would be their personal blog and their Disqus comments. You can follow someone on Disqus and see all the blog comments they’ve left, and respond to one of them.… Continue Reading

When I get stuck on coming up with target sites, content ideas or both, I sometimes turn to Yasiv. It’s useful for many link building purposes—if you’re working in the e-commerce sector, it shows you what kind of products people are buying along with your product. You can also couple it with other tools to do competitor analysis, pitch products for reviews to relevant sites, or use it to just see how your product is doing in general.

Find links between products purchased together to generate content and target site ideas for links. [tweet this]

Yasiv pulls its data from Amazon, so it’s pretty indicative of what people are buying. I’ll note that it has a few bugs because it’s a rapidly evolving service, but it works nicely for our purposes.… Continue Reading

It seems that the SEO landscape is really prone to get inundated with “secrets.” The idea behind it is that there is some deeply hidden SEO secret experts use for themselves to earn millions without telling anybody else. Indeed, some of the so-called black hat SEO (for most people, simply called SPAM) truly works like that.

On the other hand, many legit SEO experts believe in the “SEO secret” approach: They try to hide their best techniques to sustain a competitive advantage. You will find a lot of agency-owning types who rarely or never publish techniques or case studies, and they brag instead about the “Fortune 500″ clients they have had. They drop some names everybody knows, and then people are convinced they are some high-profile experts. After all, they worked with huge brands, gigantic companies and corporations everybody knows.… Continue Reading

Having built literally thousands of links over the course of the last five years I’ve seen and built just about all link types under the sun. Time and time again I come back to unlinked brand mentions as my most successful way of obtaining Penguin-proof links. Sure it’s not really a “secret” since many link builders tout this as a great resource, but I feel it’s far undervalued and shouldn’t be glossed over. I highly recommend to our clients that they spend the time to invest in uncovering brand mentions without links.

At minimum set up an alert for any new indexed pages that mention your brand. I’ve used Google Alerts in the past, although not always 100% reliable. Talkwalker is an alternative free option you can use that other experts also suggest. Your brand mentions will be served up to you via e-mail. Click on the link and see if your brand mention is actually linked to your site. It’s not? Ask for it!… Continue Reading

"Our clients often tell us we're one in a million. Turns out we're really just one of a hundred thousand or so. But what they're really saying is that we get results that increase traffic, sales and ROI! Number one of a million? Yeah, that's where we put you when we velocitize your web marketing."